eyes.2c Reviews

Singapore Sapphire (Harriet Gordon Mystery #1) by A. M. Stuart          It's the early 1900's in Singapore. So realistic I felt I was there! Harriet Gordon, widowed and made childless in one fell swoop in India due to Typhus, went home to England. It was there she came in contact with the Suffragette Movement, an organization that espoused those things she'd not only envisioned, but felt deeply. That path ended badly and she joined her brother in Colonial Singapore where he is the Reverend and Headmaster of a prestigious boys school for expats. Wanting to at least earn some sort of living (any work she does for the school is unpaid) Harriet takes out an advertisement to work as a private secretary. Sir Oswald Newbold is deciding to write his memoirs and calls on her services. Unfortunately when Hattie arrives she finds Sir Oswald dead with his throat cut. Inspector Robert Curran is quite taken with the sensibility of Harriet when he arrives at the crime...

A Christmas Escape: A Novel by Anne Perry   I It took me a while to realize that this story is about Hester Monk's brother, Charles Latterly. Charles has decided to escape the harshness of a Victorian London Christmas and has journeyed to a small island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the north coast of Sicily, containing one of three active volcanoes in Italy. His hostelry is perched against the upper reaches of the volcano. Here Charles hopes to attain a measure of inner healing, a different perspective. What he finds is a strange mixture of guests and a volcano that appears anything but benign. The dark grumbling of that entity are viewed differently by the guests. Some are drawn to it, others repelled. Languid days, the mystery of the volcano, the sense of something almost mystical beyond the grasp of mere mortals colours the background and enhances the electricity amongst the various guests, all calmed by the host, Stefano whose culinary abilities seem to act at times as ...